Beauty is Pain

Beauty is Pain:

Transsexuals do not go gentle into that good night

ROME, April 2009 – An ambulance arrives with screaming siren at the San Pietro hospital. The medical staff rush the patient to casualty. Overdosing on cocaine, he is about to exchange the temporal for the eternal. When the patient finally recovers, he rages: “It’s Marrazzo’s fault. It’s Marrazzo’s fault.” Nobody pays attention to the allegations against the president of Lazio –just another ranting transsexual.

Six months later, the Marrazzo scandal explodes. Collateral damage includes the carbonised corpse of a transsexual prostitute and a drug dealer who overdosed after a police officer had given him a lethal mixture of heroin and cocaine. Rome’s mayor announces he is planning a unit for transsexuals in Ponte Galeria, Italy’s largest detention centre.

July 2010, city councillor Pier Paolo Zaccai is standing naked on an apartment terrace in Via Manlio Torquato. Like a madman he shouts that two Brazilian transsexuals are holding him hostage. When the police take Zaccai to hospital, it appears he is high on cocaine. Falsely accused of kidnapping, the Brazilians remark: “That’s how Romans are: gay and malicious”.

***

"Sei operata? Sei dotata? Quanto costa?" Four youngsters in a sports car are hassling all prostitutes on the square in front of the abattoir. Valeria, an elegant mulatta, turns her head away and scans the square for clients. She has to make hundred fifty Euros tonight.

The youngsters look like students; the car is obviously daddy’s. Earlier this night, they tried their luck with tourist girls, now they are on a “puttan tour” –Via Salaria, the abattoir, Viale Guglielmo Marconi, EUR ... They are Valeria’s age. Later on this night, they will score drugs before going back to hotel Mum and Dad.

Valeria had to leave home when she was fifteen.

Her father had gone berserk when he discovered that his son Valerio liked dressing up as a girl, to become Valeria. Whereas her classmates were going through puberty, Valeria was thrown straight into adulthood. No holding hands, no romantic strolls, but impersonal paid sex: thirty reais for a blowjob, fifty for the full menu.

Unlike her peers, Valeria never used drugs. Violence became part of everyday life. She carried a razorblade to cut her forearms in case the police would arrest her –in Brazil it was safer ending up in hospital than in a police station. In Europe, however, life would be better.

Hot air twirls the smell of meat, excrements and waste around the abattoir. Shattered glass, empty perfume sprays and used toilet paper clutter the pavement along the graffiti wall. Valeria tries to balance herself in high heels. Cars are jamming the square. Motorcycles roar through. The students turn around the corner. Almost midnight and it is like rush hour!

Neither clients nor prostitutes care about the camera surveillance. When the previous city council installed CCTV, the Casale Rosso neighbourhood hoped that recording licence plates would deter clients.

Below the windows of the apartment buildings, clients and prostitutes are having sex. Valeria knows that the residents, mainly young families, are trying to sleep. Her gaze slides over the playground and its iron fencing. She would never want to live in a place like this, let alone raise a child.

Yet, Valeria has to make a living. She will have to earn the money by dawn. Since her visa expired, every public space is off-limits by day. Especially in August, when the city is near empty, a tall mulatta does not go unnoticed. “Every morning I pay a private cab to go home,” she says. “Unemployed and retired Italians make fortunes driving us girls.”

Right next to the square a sandwich van radiates like a beacon in the night. A client drops Valeria off. She spots Paula standing at the van. Paula is Argentinean. Valeria and Paula occasionally chat in between tricks. At first, they communicated in a mix of Spanish, Portuguese and Roman dialect they picked up from clients. Still, they are not close. In this square nobody is. Here, everybody is either a client or a competitor.

“Look at them,” Paula kicks off. “Office workers, civil servants, builders: ordinary men longing for adventure. Europeans chasing tropical fantasies.” Turning to the row of cars, she yells “How does it feel, shagging the Third World at home?”

“Well Paula, the client I just had treated me really nice. He said I am very feminine. Maybe one day he’ll invite me for dinner.”

“No, my dear! Stop dreaming. Italians would rather be caught dead than being seen in public with a transsexual.”

Valeria knows. She once got involved with a client. She hoped that he would be her ticket out. But as soon as fresh meat had hit the abattoir, her beloved traded her in for the latest South-American plaything.

It is 2 a.m. A police car patrols the square. Instantly, clients stop examining the girls, accelerate their cars and leave the square hoping the police will not make them pull over. Valeria removes her high heels and runs off barefoot. In fifteen months’ time, the police have detained five hundred eighty transgendered prostitutes on this square.

She hides in the high grass on the hills. The neighbourhood committee periodically asks the municipal services to burn it. Crouched between used condoms and rubbish, Valeria considers working in an apartment. She could rent a room in a side street of Via Condotti. The authorities do not control this apartment: the owner is an ex-carabiniere.

The police car is gone. One by one, the girls resume their places. Despite the risk of being sent to a detention centre, Valeria enjoys working the streets. She likes being in the open.

All day she hides in a “monolocale” that is tucked away in a Pigneto backstreet –Italian women call the police right away when they spot a transsexual in their building. An aged Brazilian transsexual with Italian citizenship owns the studio flat. The previous generation still succeeded in sham marriages. These naturalized transsexuals buy property and set up businesses in Italy and Brazil. They pass customs and do not worry about police controls when driving –they even took their driving licence in Italy.

Meanwhile, the Mario Mieli volunteers are on their weekly tour. The organisation has been helping foreign transsexuals since Rome replaced Paris as the world’s capital of transgender prostitution. While some volunteers distribute condoms, others follow up on girls taking medication –half the girls have hepatitis, more than one in ten has syphilis and two-third of the older ones have HIV. The organisation helped Valeria to take a course. Valeria would like to become a hairdresser. But apart from the hair salon a Brazilian transsexual owns near Porta Maggiore, only one other salon in Rome, the one in Via Urbana, employs a transsexual hairdresser.

Hence, the beat goes on. “Sei operata? Sei dotata? Quanto costa?” Again and again. How much rudeness can a person take? Valeria is saving up for that last operation; she wants to become a woman. “But how then would I make a living?” she sighs. “I would lose all my clients!”

Around 4 a.m. loud and rasp voices fill the square. The girls, strung out on alcohol, drugs and hormones, are giving come-ons to the drivers and the passengers. Cars are speeding. One driver twirls his car in the middle of the square, making the tires squeal.

Albanian gangs encircle the square. At this time of the night, many girls carry in their purse a night’s takings. They leave the square in small groups. Empty spots appear. Valeria wants to leave but she still needs hundred Euros to send a remittance.

Valeria sends money home to help her mother out. Last time she called even her father spoke to her. They had not spoken since she had to leave home. He told her that he was sorry and that she was always welcome. He used the remittances to buy himself a car.

A 4X4 pulls over beside Valeria. The stereo is pumping electronic dance music. The passengers, a middle-aged couple, are visibly under the influence.

“Hey,” the woman shrieks. “Are you trans… gressive?” Her husband bursts out laughing. He clearly enjoys that his wife is doing the talking. At night, these women are more masculine, and these men more feminine than Valeria. By day, of course, they are beyond suspicion. “We’ll pay you a hundred Euros.”

“I don’t mind the two of you snorting cocaine,” Valeria says, “but I won’t. I don’t do drugs.”

“I see,” the woman says, turning a superior smile to Valeria. “Fifty Euros then. Take it or leave it.”

Valeria gets in the car.

Oh dear. They have dropped her on a desolate stretch of Via Emilio Longoni, two blocks east of the abattoir. Veteran transsexuals –women actually, since they are operated– are skulking the scarcely lit pavement. A motorist cruises down the street. Two parked cars have their headlights left on. Valeria distinguishes wooden shacks between the trees and the rubbish. Each time a client comes up, a woman walks him to the shacks.

The women live a hand-to-mouth existence. They also dwell in the shacks. Hardly a month after Gianni Alemanno had become mayor of Rome, and announced an anti-prostitution decree, the Tor Sapienza neighbourhood took to the streets to protest against the prostitutes. Ordinary family men raided the shacks. The prostitutes recognised several clients among them!

Valeria notices the women’s plastic surgery is unravelling. Clients solicit them “cabrio”, unprotected sex. Valeria shivers. These old women are at death’s door!

Valeria rushes up the road to where the lights are. In front of the American Hospital, barely thirty metres from the shacks, Rome’s most stunning transsexuals parade. Their silhouettes turn the pavement into an open-air catwalk.

Amid young colleagues and frenzied clients, Valeria looks back into the darkness, towards the shacks: “Ordinary people confine us to the pavement, night-time, and youth. Not beauty –dresses, hormones or a sex operation– but money will secure me a place in this world.”

Almost dawn. The early train passes the Palmiro Togliatti station. Heavy traffic is picking up on the Via Prenestina. The square in front of the abattoir looks desolate. Valeria is still short of eighty Euros.

An exclusive BMW approaches. It slows to a stop. Valeria sashays to the car. The driver is a distinguished forty-something wearing a suit. Valeria notices his wedding ring.

“Hi honey. Got lost? Next door, they do meat. Here, we trade in flesh.”

“Davvero? You must be Brazilian,” he says.

“No. Colombian, actually.”

“I see. So, you can get the best coke in the world, can’t you?”

“Of course I can.”

Sensing blood, the hunter moves in for the kill: "Let’s walk on the wild side!”

“Do you have eighty Euros?”

"Eighty? Vabbè. Tell me,” he pauses, “are you into kinky sex?"

"Yes my dear,” Valeria says, forcing a smile. “Sono come mi vuoi.*"

(* I am as you want me to be.)